Migrating to the Cloud
Table of Content
Introduction
3
Designing your Virtual Data Center
3
Auditing Your Exesting Environment
4
Building Your Virtual Data Center
5
Migration in five Steps
5
Step 1: Select an Operating System
6
Step 2: Install Applications and Services
7
Step 3: Migrate Your Data
8
Step 4: Test Your New Site
8
Step 5: Move Your Live Site
9
10 Tips For A Successful Project
10
Your Migration Plan
11
Introduction
You’ve learned about ProfitBricks’ advantages. You know that you can get ser-ver, network, and storage based on your needs – not based on pre-packaged configurations. You’ve done the analysis on how much money you will save with ProfitBricks. Now, you’re ready to get started with your ProfitBricks account. Whether you’re an expert, or you’re new to the cloud, having a good plan for migrating your existing infrastructure to the ProfitBricks cloud will ensure a suc-cessful, low-risk, and cost-effective migration. This guide covers best practices for migrating to the ProfitBricks cloud from your legacy physical or virtual infra-structure.
Designing your Virtual Data Center
Designing and provisioning your Virtual Data Center with servers, storage, load balancers, firewalls, and associated networking is easy using the ProfitBricks Data Center Designer (DCD). Before you get started, though, you face a chal-lenge: how do you decide what your cloud environment should look like? Deter-mining the best architecture for your system is key to success in the cloud. The first step: ensuring you have a good understanding of your existing environment.
A migration plan
usual-ly includes four steps.
Let’s look at each of
these steps in detail.
Auditing Your Exesting Environment
Before you get started on your new Virtual Data Center, it’s important to have a thorough map of your existing environment. How many servers are in use? Do you need load balancers? Do you need multiple subnets? You will need to collect information from your existing servers and network equipment, in-cluding:
• How many servers are in use?
• What are the current memory/CPU configurations of existing servers? • What are the storage requirements (performance and disk space) for
your applications and/or databases?
• What network interfaces does each server have?
• How do applications on your servers interact – what are the dependen-cies?
• How do your end-users access the application?
Be sure to engage each of the stakeholders in your organization. That may include resources from application, database, network, security, storage, and systems teams.
Remenber, the more
time you spend
as-sessing your
envoro-nment, the more
suc-cessful you migration
will be.
Building Your Virtual Data Center
Once you have gathered this information, you can get started with Data Cen-ter Designer. Sketch out the networks, servers, storage, and load balancers you will need. Don’t worry about getting it perfect the first time: remember, you can always scale servers and change network configurations at any time. Use this “virtual whiteboard” for a final architecture review with your team; once it’s finalized, just click to provision.
Migration in five Steps
Once your environment is designed and provisioned, you’ll need to migrate from your old systems to your new systems. Of course, you’ll want your migration to be as seamless as possible, avoiding any downtime for your customers. With careful planning, your migration should be nearly invisible to your users.
A migration ususally takes five steps:
1. Selecting an Operating System Image
2. Install Applications and Services
3. Migrate Your Data
4. Test Your New Site
5. Move Your Customers
Once your
environ-ment is designed and
provisioned, you’ll
need to migrate from
your old systems to
your new systems
Step 1:
Select an Operating System
For your operating system build, you may choose to import an existing image, use a pre-defined ProfitBricks image, or build your own image. Each has ad-vantages and disadad-vantages, as summarized in the table below.
OS Strategy Pros Cons
Import Existing Image In some limited circumstances, may be an easy alternative for copying programs and data at the same time.
Exporting your existing VM may be difficult or im-possible depending on your current provider. You may encounter compatibility issues if your current provider is using non-standard virtualiza-tion techniques.
Copying your existing VM image over the network may be inefficient, as it includes operating system files which are already available from ProfitBricks templates.
May require outage to your existing infrastructure in order to capture a valid image of your current VM.
Use A Profitbricks
Image Easy and quick – pre-defined OS images are available for many versions of Windows and various Linux distributions.
Darüber hinaus haben Sie unter Umständen den Wunsch, die vorhandenen Images zusätzlich an Ihre Bedürfnisse anzupassen. You may wish to do some additional customization of stock images. Build Your Own Image Most flexible approach.
ProfitBricks provides ISO installation media for Windows and Linux, which you can use for your baseline installation.
Additional up-front work required.
Once you’ve selected an OS image (and uploaded any custom ones), you can deploy that image to virtual machines on ProfitBricks by simply selecting the image in Data Center Designer, found in a host’s storage settings. http://www.profitbricks.co.uk/press-and-info-center/faq
Step 2:
Install Applications and Services
Now that you have built your OS image, you can start installing your appli-cations and services on your ProfitBricks instances. Again, you have a few possible strategies: if you imported a full virtual machine, your applications may be included in that VM; if you run DevOps tools such as Chef, you can deploy with your existing tools; or, you may install applications manually.
Application Migration Strategy
Pros Cons
VM-based installation As with OS images, in some limited circum-stances, may be an easy alternative for copy-ing programs and data at the same time.
Exporting your existing VM may be difficult or im-possible depending on your current provider. You may encounter compatibility issues if your current provider is using non-standard virtualiza-tion techniques.
Copying your existing VM image over the network may be inefficient, as it includes operating system files which are already available from ProfitBricks templates.
May require outage to your existing infrastructure in order to capture a valid image of your current VM
Tools-based Installation If you’re already using DevOps tools such as Chef, migration is simple.
Ensures that new system is a perfect, comple-te implementation of your environment. If you’re using Chef to manage your environ-ment, you’ll love our knife plugin. Read more about Chef, and the ProfitBricks Chef integra-tion, in our blog post Hello @Opscode, #Chef Integration Comes To ProfitBricks.
You must already be using, or must adopt, a De-vOps tool.
Manual Installation Most flexible approach – will work regardless
of the setup of your current environment Requires manual work to ensure applications are installed and configured properly Replicating databases requires some knowledge of database-specific replication technologies.
Step 3:
Migrate Your Data
Now that your servers and applications are set up, it’s time to migrate your data. We find that most customers use a combination of file synchronization technologies such as rsync and database replication technologies. You’ll find pointers to documentation on each of these options at our support site; as always, contact us if we can help.
IMost users copy static data, and pre-stage dynamic data, in advance of a migration window. If you’ve done this, then during the migration window, you can simply set your site to read-only mode, finalize the migration of any dynamic data, and then bring up your site on the ProfitBricks cloud.
Step 4:
Test Your New Site
Testing your new site before it goes live is a critical, and often omitted, step in the migration process. Before you migrate your users, ensure you have completed a full QA cycle in your new environment. Ensure that all of your usual monitoring tools are in place, and not reporting any issues. And ensure your standard operations processes, such as backup and scheduled tasks, are in place.
http://www.profitbricks.co.uk/press-and-info-center/faq
Cloud computing
provi-ders virtualize, allocate
and architect their
spe-cific platforms
different-ly from one another.
Performance thrives
with some services
and suffers with others.
Step 5:
Move Your Live Site
You’ve created your Virtual Data Center, installed your applications and ser-vices, staged static and dynamic data, and thoroughly tested. Now comes the fun part!
A typical migration would involve the following steps: • Complete a final readiness validation of the new site • Notify stakeholders of migration schedules
• Reduce DNS Time-To-Live (TTL) for quick updates on the day of the migration
• Convert the site into read-only mode
• Finalize data migration, making new site the authoritative source for files and databases
• Update DNS to point your users to the new site
• Normalize the newly-live site (taking out of read-only mode)
The details of these steps, of course, depend on your application – but you should consider this general outline as you develop your own plan.
Now that your
ser-vers and applications
are set up, it’s time to
migrate your data.
10 Tips For A Successful Project
1. Select applications for migration carefully. Consider which applications will work best in a cloud environment, and consider migrating smaller or less critical applications first to ensure you have tested the migration process.
2. Engage all of the application stakeholders, including developers, vendors, operations staff, and end-users when and where appropriate.
3. Don’t forget to test your full application and data stack before making your site live – including all of your existing monitoring and QA tools.
4. Pre-stage static and dynamic data to avoid lengthy data synchronization during the migration.
5. Reduce DNS time-to-live (TTL) well before the day of your migration, ensuring end-users are directed to your new site in a timely manner.
6. Check with your customers and vendors for IP-address-based restrictions; ensure your new IPs are included in any relevant firewall configurations.
7. If you’re concerned about redundancy for your application, you should create servers spread across ProfitBricks availability zones. See our support site for more information about using availability zones.
8. Regularly create snapshots of your disks. Snapshots allow you to restore your server to a point-in-time backup, and give you the peace of mind that you can always roll back to a known-good point in time..
9. If you feel snapshots don’t offer enough protection for your needs, consider off-site ba-ckups. See our support site or contact us for backup best-practice recommendations. 10. Remember, we’re here to help! Whether you’re looking for information about best
Your Migration Plan
Step 1: Selecting an Operating System Image
Step 2: Install Applications and Services
Step 3: Migrate Your Data
Step 4: Test Your New Site
Step 5: Move Your Users
ProfitBricks GmbH Greifswalder Strasse 207 10405 Berlin, Germany Phone: +49 (0)30 577 008 40 Fax: +49 (0)30 577 008 598 Email: product@profitbricks.com URL: www.profitbricks.co.uk
